Back to the Future - April 29, 2007
Acts 9: 36-43Acts, the story of the very early church, is one of those Biblical books that gets short shrift in our tradition. I admit that it is one of those books I don’t preach very often, which is a shame, really. Acts takes over where the gospels leave off, and tells us how the church transformed from a small group of Jesus’ close personal friends, to a worldwide religious force. Two of the main characters in Acts are Peter and Paul.
Today’s passage focuses on a story of healing starring Peter and the only female disciple named in the Bible, Tabitha. It is significant that the author, who most scholars believe to be the same person who penned Luke’s gospel, not only names Tabitha (we know many women in the Bible go unnamed, right?) but also calls her by the designation usually only reserved for the most honored of men. I know I’ve spoken from this place about the usual role of women in Biblical society. Women in the ancient world were valued for their ability to bear and raise children and to tend to the needs of the men in the culture. Women were also property of the men in their lives—first their fathers, then their husbands. The members of society who were at most risk were women who had no men, especially widows who had no sons.
Tabitha took care of widows, sewing clothes for them. It may not sound like a big deal, but it was. Widows were dependent solely on the kindnesses of others to survive. So it was when Tabitha died, that the widows were left with no one. They summoned Peter, and he came and saw her there, already prepare for burial.
Now, Peter had never performed a resurrection, but he had seen the evidence of resurrection with his own eyes. Imperfect, sometimes doubtful, sometimes in denial, Peter—that’s who they sent for. When I worked in the health care field, more than nine years ago, there was a saying about learning new procedures: ”See one, do one, teach one.” Watch somebody draw blood, draw blood, teach somebody else how to draw blood. Until all three steps were completed, I was not a phlebotomist.
Imagine for a moment if you are Peter, and you are standing in room full of crying widows, hovering over a recently deceased woman, without whom the survival of those widows is uncertain. Imagine that the unwritten but clear expectation is that you will do something about the dead friend. Imagine that you do not actually know how to raise anybody from the dead, but you saw that Christ was once dead and now he lives, so you try anyway. See one, do one, teach one. Which of those three steps do you think is the most terrifying?
Many times, in my ministry, I feel caught either between seeing and doing, or between doing and teaching. I can describe for you the first baptism I did, or how it felt to preside at this table for the first time. I vividly remember my first sermon ever, or the first few minutes moderating my first session meeting. What I remember mostly about those firsts is how I was basically in a room with other people who were looking at me as if I knew what I was doing, even though I did not really know what I was doing. I had, however witnessed those things being done, so I wasn’t totally out there with nothing to fall back on.
So Peter clears the room—maybe he didn’t want the widows standing around watching him if he failed. Soon it is just Peter and Tabitha—and roomful of expectation, and a crowd downstairs who is counting on Peter-human, fallible, sometimes full-of-doubt Peter.
The last time Peter saw somebody raise somebody else from the dead, the words used were pretty simple, so Peter goes with that. “Tabitha, get up.” And suddenly she I alive and whole and Peter is showing the evidence to the saints and widows. Now a whole new group of people will have “seen one”. And so it is with the church.
It seems to me that the purpose for the church is to be the “See one, do one, teach one “ mechanism of Christianity for the world. Why else would the church exist?
I participated recently in an online book discussion of a book by Diana Butler Bass titled “Christianity For The Rest of Us.” I read this book several months ago, and I’ve written about it to you in the monthly newsletter before. It was recommended to me by a friend, and it has gotten me excited about being mainline protestant. I may be strange to hear that a pastor needs to be reminded of how great it is to belong to her very own tradition--a tradition she sought out, and whose hoops she willingly jumped through--but believe me, it is necessary sometimes!
The book is 308 pages of possibility. There are stories of ten churches living out the gospel in this brave new world of ours. Churches in this book do this not by abandoning what has made them great over decades for the newest thing out there, but by cherishing what is really essential to the gospel message and by carefully examining what their particular mission in their particular setting is. They see one, they do one, they teach one.
Clergy—at least the clergy I know and love—don’t live in a vacuum. We see the other churches (You know the kid I’m talking about) springing up out here in the suburbs, and we see how they pack ‘em in every Sunday, how the youth ministry explodes, how the small group ministry flourishes. And any pastor who tells you they don’t ever wonder, “How can I do that?” isn’t being very honest with you.
So it took a book, by someone who studied this very same subject—somebody who came from the mainline and stayed mainline—to remind me that in order to see what the world needs from the church today, it is imperative to look back at the very best the church has had to offer throughout tradition. Sometimes you have to look back to see the future.
It’s not as complicated as we try to make it. Peter was able to strip resurrection down to the essential elements: He had seen one, so he could do one. While we may not be able to raise strangers from literal death (or maybe we can—I’m certainly not the one to say we can’t), the story of Peter and Tabitha reminds us that although Peter did not have Jesus right there by his side, talking him through it, the world was a place where resurrection could happen because Christ had been in it. Our world is a place where new life—abundant life—can exist because Christ has been in it. And that opens up all kinds of possibilities where the church might have forgotten that resurrection exists. There exists the possibility that the parts of me that I once thought were dead—the parts of you that you had already prepared for burial—can be brought back to life. This is the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God.
